Show HN: Ledonardo, my light painting hardware project
stavros.io
stavros.io
In the end though it doesn't matter that you aren't original, it matters that you did it and possibly added something new (spending time thinking about resolution, color quality, etc).
I'm not very fussed about being the first anyway, it was just fun to think that I created something nobody else had before. Fun while it lasted, anyway :P
The point is to make stuff and enjoy it, you're still an inventor. And the things you _do_ with your projects are half the fun, your photos are really fun and I wouldn't have thought of a lot of them.
Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bitbangerlabs/pixelstic... Pixelstick website: http://www.thepixelstick.com/ They also now make the ColorSpike: https://colorspike.com/
Regardless, your DIY solution looks really cool and well done! Props!
I think this artist was inspired by the workings of a photocopier, which the second person who wrote the software to decode and expose it clearly picked up on.
I'll update this later if I get to my desktop and can post a link to that project.
Very cool. This reminded me of the bike-mounted dot-matrix printer. Similar concept: light vs ink. https://www.wired.com/2004/08/cops-put-brakes-on-bike-protes...
What I find interesting is that I never had an issue with dropped columns over network using the ESP32 as an AP. Did you connect the ESP8266 up to an existing network?
I didn't see a mention of how you designed the brushes in this write up, were they all just images on an SD? I experimented with a palette app to design the brushes (solids, gradients, images, manual) and to send the frames to the brush. Curious what your solution was!
This year I am adding a gyroscope to the device to experiment with 3D space and holographic content. Also trying different LED attachments (like a circular or matrix display) for different effects. There's a lot more to explore!
I'm happy to see this today, the denser version looks very nice!
[1] https://twitter.com/JeffScript/status/1178446997507977216?s=...
The brushes were just images, yes. It's interesting that you'd ask that, because I didn't have a concept of a brush (it's all just images), whereas you do, since you use them :) In my case, I have a PNG with the pixels I want, and then select the minimum time step and duplicate the columns in the PNG as I want them, so I run through each PNG column to generate the "brush".
I really like how your example "fans out" by activating more LEDs in time, I should try that as well. I think you'd get much better results with some electrical tape as a diffuser (unless you like the stripes!) too.
You're probably right about the dropped packets, though it makes me concerned I'll eventually run into the same problem and my whole workflow depends on the network not sucking lol
Do you set your time step arbitrarily? I haven't implemented a solution for stabilizing the time step (until the gyroscope is added) and found it very difficult to get non-skewed results on images. Yours look really nice though, was that just patience and a steady hand?
I really want to improve the density on mine after seeing your results. For sure I'll work on better diffusion as well, we had one that blurred the results too much so we bailed on the idea but I think a denser strip and a tighter diffusion would be awesome.
The ESP32 is pretty beefy, can you not do things on-device? I wouldn't rely on the network after what I've seen, but I haven't tried the ESP32.
My time step is constant, I have a parameter for it but I rarely change it. It's mostly a steady hand, yeah.
Are you talking about horizontal or vertical density? Vertically, the 60 pixel per meter strip is the best you can do (there are some denser ones but need a lot of current), but a diffuser will make it look much better. Horizontally, you can get very fine resolution, up to the refresh rate of the strip.
Edit: found an old picture https://imgur.com/a/pyCT9HX
Have you considered adding some kind of depth support that would allow you to make "3D" images by moving not only left and right, but also back and forth?
My first thought was that with something like this (https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/wings-small.jp...), it would be cool to walk around the subject and have the "wings" actually furl AROUND them rather than simply in front of them, though that might take some choreography to make sure that your own shadow doesn't affect the image too much.
Another thing that I thought was that if you can also selectively turn on only portions of the bar, you could effectively create "windows" in the portrait as you did with the other set of wings (https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/alexandra-smal...), which could work really well with something 3D-ish, where you can see through one part of the lights to a different background also generated by the lights.
I'll play a bit with the window idea, feel free to follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/stavroskorok/ if you want to see the progress (I post all photography-related doings there).
You probably can turn this into a phone light brush app if you use front camera and screen as a led (the torch usually don't change color), but it still has some challenges with respect to latency (in dark environment cheap camera get slow) and user-friendliness specially if it needs calibration.
If it is really a problem, assume pose velocity from the previous frame positions and correct for latency and turn off the screen if acceleration sensor is greater than a value.
I remembered seeing those LED painted images. Have just checked Youtube and they have come a long way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkMj1bt96Cc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEa7R7BRUj4
I think some project an image based on their Angular velocity, others might just be timer-based. Here's a link to a product I've had my eyes on for a while (https://ignispixel.com/store/poi-pro/ignis-pixel-poi-256-hd) the video there should work.
self._np.buf = column
self._np.write()
I ended up building a 64x64 (4096 or 4K) display that did 30FPS, you could drive it with all sorts of different things including scraping screen pixels or sending a webcam output to it.
It consumed a bunch of power (500W) and was a bit clunky but a friend rebuilt it and I think it made it to burning man this year (and came back too dusty to use).
txting him this link, he’s gunna love it!
Have you thought of also doing video with it, via stop frame animation, although that could be very time consuming!
But make the patterns animated, so for example with https://www.stavros.io/posts/behold-ledonardo/maria-small.jp... you could have the light appear to rotate around the lady.
I imagine it'd be extremely slow work, creating enough photos though!
To appear in the final photo, a person would need to remain in place for a significant amount of time.
And the name is brilliant... LEDonardo (giggles).